The Outlaw Ocean

Fish farming is sold as a sustainable solution to the world’s ever-growing appetite for seafood. But that solution…turns out to have a major problem: what farmed fish are being fed.

For the past five years, The Outlaw Ocean Project has been investigating the fish feed industry. It’s booming. And it’s causing severe environmental problems, contributing to civil unrest, and depleting wild fish stocks in a way that’s anything but sustainable. 

Outlaw Ocean host and director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, Ian Urbina, sat down with The Current’s Matt Galloway to talk about his latest investigation.

The Mile Zero Murders investigates the baffling wave of disappearances and murders in the small town of Dawson Creek, B.C., a community struggling with a deadly local drug trade. Host Timothy Sawa explores missing person cases like that of Cole Hosack and Renee Didier, pursuing leads from grieving families, reluctant authorities and the drug dealers themselves. The question that drives this series is the same one that haunts this community: where is the justice?

About UNCOVER: Crime. Investigation. Revelation. Uncover brings you explosive, high-caliber true crime year-round. From CIA mind control to serial abuse, mysterious disappearances to wrongful imprisonment. Each season features a new host who is deeply connected to the story, committed to tracking down the truth. With over 30 seasons to choose from, Uncover represents the best in true crime.

More episodes of The Mile Zero Murders are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/MZMxOO

Following the critically acclaimed series Hunting Warhead, Season 2: Hunting the Suicide Salesman follows host Daemon Fairless as he takes us inside another dark corner of the internet: the online world helping people take their own lives. When people around the world started killing themselves with an obscure substance a few years ago, police were unaware that something – someone – was tying many of these deaths together.

It took grieving families and investigative journalists to piece together what was actually happening and to trace the source of the substance – first, to an online suicide forum and then, to a salesman in Canada: Kenneth Law. Police believe he sent more than 1200 shipments to 41 countries… and may be connected to more than 145 deaths around the world.

More episodes of Hunting the Suicide Salesman are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/HTSSxOO

Award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt returns with a new season of Drilled, her podcast about the deception, disinformation, and power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach. In September 2025, a group of Brazilian ministers trekked all the way to chilly North Dakota to see a presentation on a new type of clean energy project, one that promised to help them deliver Brazilian President Lula’s dream of turning Brazil into “the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels.” It was the latest in a string of projects from Midwest Republican kingmaker and corn ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, whose investments in Brazil might just transform him into a global carbon czar, even as his Summit pipeline carbon project faces fierce opposition from Iowa to North Dakota. The problem? It requires a ton of land and does nothing for climate change.

The Outlaw Ocean takes you into the murky, underreported systems at sea. Drilled’s ambitious reporting does something similar, tracking complex web of political influence and corporate power to see who benefits, who pays the costs, and whether climate solutions hold up under scrutiny.

Here’s episode 1 of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys. Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts and hear episodes early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

Someone Knows Something is the investigative true crime series by award-winning documentarian David Ridgen. 

In Season 10 of Someone Knows Something, host David Ridgen investigates the sudden 2021 disappearance of Jaclyn Ferland-Smith, a Canadian expat living in Playas del Coco, a paradise veiled in rumour and fear on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

More episodes of Someone Knows Something are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/SKS10xTOO

On the night of September 11, 2012, a deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. What followed this tragedy was a political storm that raised questions about America’s role in the world, established a playbook for weaponizing attention in the age of social media, and ultimately changed the course of U.S. history.Here's a preview of Fiasco: Benghazi, from Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, which revisits a political scandal that dominated the latter half of the Obama years and lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump. In this episode, Leon explores how a prison massacre carried out under Libya’s long-time dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, set the stage for the Benghazi attack. Find Fiasco: Benghazi wherever you get podcasts and binge the full season now with a Pushkin+ subscription. Find Pushkin+ on the Fiasco show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus

They say you should never meet your heroes. Daemon Fairless disagrees. He takes us behind-the-scenes on The Outlaw Ocean, S2, from his intimate vantage point as its story editor. Fairless begins by asking host Ian Urbina why he takes the kinds of risks he takes.

This is a frank, illuminating discussion with Urbina, who quit his New York Times job to do some of the hardest, most difficult and often dangerous reporting in the world. He’s since become the de facto beat reporter for the world’s oceans — and if you’ve listened to the series you know his investigations reveal the shocking prevalence of forced labour, mind-boggling overfishing, and the hard truth is that it’s all connected to the cheap seafood we love.

If you’re also wondering what it’s really like to do these investigations, and what Urbina hopes his reporting will achieve, this is the conversation for you.

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and has sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until The Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions.

Episode highlights:

• North Korean labour is forced labour by definition — nobody has a choice. Officially, China is in line with the rest of the UN Security Council in sanctioning North Korea and its regime-funding labour. But, unofficially, since 2017, China has quietly but consistently violated those sanctions. This is an open secret China has successfully kept hidden from the West. Until now.
• Despite the prohibition against North Korean labour, the US state department estimates that there are over 100,000 North Korean workers currently in China. We set out to humanize these numbers, compare them to Chinese data, and connect some dots. But first we reckon with the fact that local people helping us with this reporting are risking everything from espionage charges to execution. But even despite the extreme risks, two dozen workers agreed to talk to us, and be quoted by an interpreter. Their rare testimonies tell of rampant sexual assault, violence, constant monitoring and zero access to the outside world. 
• Finally, we manage to connect the dots from these testimonies to seafood being shipped to American importers that supply major retailers like Walmart, McDonald’s and Sysco - the largest food distributor on the planet. Host Ian Urbina reflects on the invisible dots of plausible deniability, which are built into the whole system. These are the dots that connect Indonesian slave labour on a ship to Uyghur labour in a factory to a grocery store down the block from your house.

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and has sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until The Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to climb aboard a dozen Chinese vessels to investigate.

Episode highlights: 

• Nowhere is more difficult to report than China, and seafood is an unusually tough product to investigate. Host Ian Urbina explains the various reporting methods his team needed to employ over the course of four years to track how seafood gets from bait to plate.
• Right at the heart of this secretive supply chain, the team finds forced Uyghur labour, with the cascading effects of family separation, relocation and a plummeting birth rate. The international community has scrutinized China’s human rights abuses against this predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, and specific laws were set up to protect them from exploitation – but the Uyghur people’s role in seafood production was totally off the radar. In total, we identified forced Uyghur labour tied to seafood imported to more than twenty countries, including the U.S. and Canada. 
• Urbina reflects on the many costs hidden along this complex supply chain, and the larger question: how have we allowed the seafood we eat to be so thoroughly co-mingled with environmental and human rights abuses? What is the true cost of the low prices we see on our seafood? And who’s really paying for it? 

Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is the single largest armada in human history. This three-part series is an unprecedented investigation into their secretive fishing practices. The fleet is so gargantuan that even the Chinese government can’t account for all its vessels. We do know it has hauled in more than 35 billion dollars worth of catch per year and sold it across the globe — and yet, almost nothing was known about its practices. That is, until the Outlaw Ocean team started asking questions, and eventually managed to get aboard.

Episode highlights:

• Averaging one dead body every six weeks, mostly-Chinese fishing vessels have been dropping their deceased off in Uruguay’s coastal capital for years. But in 2021, an Indonesian deckhand named Daniel Aritonang arrives clinging to life. He’s conscious enough to say he'd been beaten, tied up by the neck, and starved for days.
• We learn Daniel’s story is shockingly common in the world’s Chinese-run fish processing infrastructure. It's a realm where health and human safety are secondary to meeting quotas and where forced labour and human rights abuses are rampant. We learn how vulnerable people like Daniel are recruited, and how routinely they never make it home.
• The team is convinced that they need to speak directly to the crew on one of these vessels. They themselves are shocked when a captain agrees to let them aboard. Even more surprising, a minder briefly leaves host Ian Urbina alone with the crew and immediately some men plead to be rescued.